video game

What a potent opening statement. How does it make you feel? Are you sad for the fish? Are you concerned about the ecological effects? Do you wonder what caused such extinction? Or are you yelling ‘MY TASTE BUDS’ at your screen?

If the latter, I have the perfect game for you. Sushi Strikers. I also have more than a few hundred pedantic words to follow that you should probably skip. Continue reading →

As in life, many people go head first into video games cocksure and confident of their actions, be it with calculated puzzle solving skills or swift reactions and perfect aim. I am not one of these people.

Save for Tetris – I am okay at Tetris – I doubt every action, question every decision and tentatively hover over every trigger. I’m a gaming mess. A gibbering, bumbling, anxious mess.

Vegans are haunted by one particularly annoying hypothetical situation: ‘But what would you eat if you were stranded on a desert island?’ I stopped entertaining this question about a month into being a vegetarian. It’s a cop-out question from people who either can’t or won’t discuss the moral implications of the meat and dairy industry. I now often respond with the equally evasive retort: ‘How many people could actually hunt a damn animal with self-made tools as opposed to foraging?’

From the onset, it’s obvious The Last Guardian is a specifically designed experience. Fumito Ueda and Team Ico are known for their deliberately sparse and evocative worlds but a failure to pay attention to the flawed gameplay undermines such meticulous craft in The Last Guardian, creating a serene world that is equally horrific, beautiful and unnecessarily frustrating.

Naut is a gem of a game and a delightful start to the year. Think of it as an appetiser to upcoming exploration games of 2015 such as No Man’s Sky, only this game is more like a road trip in a dynamic environment with little to do and broken physics. This makes it sound messy and it is, which is precisely why it works well. The gameplay is wonderfully juxtaposed by the vivid colours, cinematic camera and epic soundtrack. It is almost serious but the only way to describe actually playing it is goofy; the great sort of goofy that breeds enjoyment.

As a Naut, you wander Mars in a Cadillac-esque car alone or in co-op. The only clue as to what you should be doing is in the tag line: Is there life on Mars? I’m not sure about the answer to that, but there’s certainly life in Naut.